A Little Woman’s Book Made a Great War.
“Speak!” demanded Simon Legree, beating Tom over the head. “What do you know?”
“I know, Mas’r: but I can’t tell anything. I can die!”
Tom did die under the blows of his master, and as he breathed his last, tears welled from eyes of readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and of those who viewed one of the many stage versions.
Later, Abraham Lincoln, who never said he had read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book or watched its performance by a traveling “Tom company,” invited Mrs. Stowe to the White House. He is said to have greeted her, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”
At age forty Harriet could have passed for a student at her father’s seminary in Maine. Married for fifteen years to one of the school’s teachers, she was a rarity in the early 1850’s, a woman activist.
Partly because money was scarce, she took one of the few career paths open to a respectable woman. By writing elegant sketches and loosely plotted tales, she hoped to win a degree of financial independence. The health of her husband, Calvin Stowe, was so precarious that she could be forced to become the family breadwinner any day.
An early collection of short pieces, The Mayflower, didn’t earn enough to pay medical bills for three months. Daughter of clergyman-educator-writer Lyman Beecher, she wasn’t stopped by literary failure. From the campus of Bowdoin College she surveyed the American scene and came up with a great idea. When her novel was completed, she insisted that it wasn’t really hers. “the Lord himself wrote it,” she said. “I was but an instrument of His hand.”
Whether from God Almighty, Harriet Beecher Stowe, or both, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written largely as an emotional response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
Senator James M. Mason of Virginia, proud author of the law, saw the gains the abolitionists were making in working for control of the House of Representatives and the United States Senate. Seeing that the balance of power was moving away from them, Mason and his fellow slaveholders fashioned this gated law that gave an owner of a fugitive slave the right to seek runaway human property in any state of territory. If unable to pursue a fugitive himself, the owner could use a hired agent. No warrant was necessary in order to seize a slave even in Boston, cradle of American independence.
Like others, Harriet Beecher Stowe was powerless to prevent implementation of the fugitive Slave Law, but at least she could protest it. However, her firsthand knowledge was skimpy and she has never lived in the South.
Maybe that was just as well, she realized. Instead of depending upon interviews, she could-with the help of the Almighty-allow her imagination to run free. Even if her novel was never published, it would give her a readership, even if only minimal income.
Launched in 1851 and eventually completed in the magazine, Harriet’s story got little attention at first. Then the John P. Jewett Company of Boston decided to bring it out as a two-volume novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly.
Shifts in public sentiment, linked with fast-increasing tension over the slavery issue, produced a publishing miracle. A so-so serial became a sensationally popular book. Within five years it was in 500,000 American homes.
Few people could claim that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was great literature. It had no well-structured plot and was entirely too long. Much of the “lowly life” it claimed to depict was completely inaccurate.
But the novel was rich in pathos. Dramatic incidents-however unbelievable-abounded. Characters were depicted so vividly that their names became household words: Uncle Tom, Simon Legree, and Topsy.
Most of all, the book had a message. People who plowed through its two volumes could no longer be neutral about slavery, the plantation system, or the rights of the oppressed. More than any other single factor, a housewife’s novel transformed the long-simmering North/South feud from a political contest into a great moral battle.
Today it makes little difference that few plantation owners were as evil as Simon Legree or that beneath stolid faces few blacks were so ready to take whatever the white man gave as was Uncle Tom.
Impact of the novel was greatly accentuated by dozens, and then by scores, of traveling theatrical companies who performed before enthralled audiences. Many such companies use genuine bloodhounds on stage; some settled for whatever vicious-looking dogs were available.
Translated into a dozen languages, the book became an international sensation. It also exercised a subtle, but powerful, influence on leaders of nations considered likely to aid the South, who could not ignore public opinion. Hence the book that Lincoln credited with having started the war was also influential in preventing the seceded states from receiving desperately needed, eagerly expected help from Europe.